Re: FATAL: bogus data in lock file "postmaster.pid": ""

Heikki Linnakangas <heikki(dot)linnakangas(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> writes:
> My laptop ran out of battery and turned itself off while I was just
> starting up postmaster. After plugging in the charger and rebooting, I
> got the following error when I tried to restart PostgreSQL:

> FATAL: bogus data in lock file "postmaster.pid": ""

> postmaster.pid file was present in the data directory, but had zero
> length. Looking at the way the file is created and written, that can
> happen if you crash after the file is created, but before it's
> written/fsync'd (my laptop might have write-cache enabled, which would
> make the window larger).

> I was a bit surprised by that. That's probably not a big deal in
> practice, but I wonder if there was some easy way to avoid that. First I
> thought we could create the new postmaster.pid file with a temporary
> name and rename it in place, but rename(2) will merrily overwrite any
> existing file which is not what we want. We could use link(2), I guess.

I think link(2) would create race conditions of its own. I'd be
inclined to suggest that maybe we should just special-case a zero length
postmaster.pid file as meaning "okay to proceed". In general, garbage
data in postmaster.pid is something I'm happy to insist on manual
recovery from, but maybe we could safely make an exception for empty
files.

regards, tom lane